1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of manufacturing a piezoelectric film composing a piezoelectric element and the like used in a liquid ejecting head and the like, a piezoelectric element, a liquid ejecting head, and a liquid ejecting apparatus.
2. Related Art
There is a piezoelectric element configured to pinch a piezoelectric material exhibiting an electromechanical transduction function, for example, a piezoelectric layer (piezoelectric film) composed of a crystallized dielectric material, between two electrodes. Such a piezoelectric element is mounted in, for example, a liquid ejecting head as an actuator apparatus in a bending vibration mode. Typical examples of the liquid ejecting head include an ink jet-type recording head in which a part of the pressure-generating chambers communicated to the nozzle openings that discharge ink droplets is composed of a vibrating plate, and the vibrating plate is deformed by a piezoelectric element so that the ink in the pressure-generating chambers is pressurized and discharged as ink droplets from the nozzle openings.
Piezoelectric materials used as the piezoelectric layer composing the piezoelectric element need to have high piezoelectric characteristics, and the typical examples include lead zirconate titanate (PZT) (refer to JP-A-2001-223404). In addition, chemical solution methods, such as the sol-gel method in which a colloid solution having an organic metallic compound dissolved in a solvent is coated and the like on an object and then burned or the metal organic deposition (MOD) method, or gas-phase methods, such as the sputtering method, the pulse laser deposition method (PLD method), and the CVD method, are known as the method of manufacturing a piezoelectric layer.
Here, there is a demand for a piezoelectric material having a suppressed lead content from the viewpoint of environmental issues. Examples of the piezoelectric materials containing no lead include BiFeO3-based piezoelectric materials containing Bi and Fe. Specific examples include piezoelectric materials made of mixed crystals of Bi(Fe, Mn) O3, and BaTiO3 (refer to JP-A-2009-252789).
However, a piezoelectric film made of the BiFeO3-based piezoelectric material has a problem in that the strain tolerance amount is relatively small.